August 2011

An Attempt to Expand the “Social Medianess” of Broadcasting

From a Demonstration Experiment of “teleda” – a TV Review SNS Site (Part I)

Ritsu Yonekura / Masaru Miyazaki / Narichika Hamaguchi

VOD-type services operated by broadcasters are vigorously growing, driven by the further speared of the Internet. By adding an element of SNS to an VOD service, communication, or public forum, via TV programs can be created on the Internet sphere. It may further lead to the expansion and invigoration of “social medianess,” which broadcasting media possess by nature, by best utilized the characteristics of the Internet.

With this in mind, the NHK Broadcasting Culture Resaerch Institute has constructed a test website “teleda,” where users can view broadcast pograms on the Internet and exchange their opinions and impression of the content and has been carrying out demonstration experiments. In the August and September issues, the authors report the outcome of an experiment and future possibilities and challenges of this attempt. This August article covers the outline of the experiment and findings from the first analyses.

Analyses of user survey and logs (record of views and posts) can be summarized as follows.

  • “teleda” is a platform which has both VOD’s and SNS’s properties. Primary users of SNS services are usually young people in their 20s and 30s of SNS, but our experiment revealed the elderly, those aged 60 and over, used this service most actively. This is backed by both the result of the survey and that of the log analyses.
  • Using various functions of “teleda,” the participants of the experiment communicated with others. They mainly exchanged opinions and impressions on the programs they viewed. As a result, certain changes were observed among many of the participants such as having become more interested in NHK programs or developed a sense of affinity to NHK, encountered with new types of content which had been unfamiliar to them, and rediscovered the joy of watching television.
  • No correlation was found between popular programs among “teleda” users during the experiment and their ratings at the time of actual broadcasts; a number of programs that did not mark high ratings when they were aired on TV turned out to be viewed by many users on “teleda.” Besides, a typical long-tail trend was also observed, with no concentration of viewers on the top few programs. These results show that SNS’s word-of-mouth effect was functioning well.
  • Nevertheless, trends of views and posts differ depending on the program genre. Programs dealing with political and/or social issues such as documentaries and news were likely to trigger a lively and lasting discussion among users, which would develop into a cyclical chain-reaction between content-viewing and posting, prompting users to view another content.
  • “Word of mouth” and “topicality” largely impact on “teleda” users’ viewing behaviors for programs ranked high in the list of number of views; among top 100 programs, more than half cases involved “other people’s behavior,” namely “word of mouth” and “topicality,” as the route to reach the content. Such outcome indicates that adding the SNS function to VOD may lead to unconventional, expanded viewing behaviors.

The NHK Monthly Report on Broadcast Research